Abstract:

The European Union, in view to the European Education Area and its future (2021-2030), has set the strategic objective of: “by 2025, at least 47% of adults aged between twenty-five and sixty-four should have carried out learning activities within the last twelve months”. This objective has been expanded in the European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan (European Commission, 2021), aiming to “by 2030, at least 60% of adults should participate in training activities once a year”. This last objective was endorsed at the 2021 Porto Social Summit.

In Europe, young adults who have not completed secondary education and are not in any educational or training course fall into the category of school dropout, amounting to 36% in the case of Spanish population who have not completed compulsory secondary education (OECD. Panorama of Education. OECD indicators. 2023), twice as many as in Europe (16,5%), and with 26,5% of young people aged 25 to 34 with basic education (Education at Glance 2023).

In this context, in order to offer training and entrepreneurship opportunities to young adults (18 to 35 years old), a group of seven entities expert in the third sector from five European countries, have developed an innovative training strategy that seeks educational success through the commitment to social transformation and employability in the third sector. This strategy is directly aimed at adults at risk of exclusion with high barriers to socialization and active participation. This is a new approach, since it focuses learning on an active education where educational competences are developed along with specific skills and attitudes that help them promote their employability in the third sector or even their entrepreneurship in it, generating associations that work to remove the barriers to which they themselves are subject.

To achieve this, a strategy has been developed that takes the concept of second chance centers one step further and adapts the training strategy of vocational training centers to the field of adult education through a mixed learning that combines on-site learning in social entities throughout Europe with a virtual training generated in innovative virtual learning spaces that we have called “E2.0C educational centers”.

Through this innovative methodology and the new E2.0C centers, we have generated the “COURSE FOR ADULT TRAINING IN THE THIRD SECTOR”, which is compatible with the educational curriculum of adults while also enabling them to carry out the tasks of Third Sector technicians in paid internships, so they can develop their own social entrepreneurship project or be part of its staff.

We believe that these internships are a dynamic and living process that allows the integration of the international, intercultural, and global dimensions in education for a transformation not only of the user himself, but also of the center, of the host social organization, and of those who interact with them.

This work has been carried out within the framework of the Erasmus+ project “E2.0C virtual adult learning centers: an opportunity to promote inclusion through educational action and social participation”.

Acknowledgements:
This work has been funded by the Erasmus+ Programme, within the project 2022-1-ES01-KA220-ADU-000089775; Spanish Service for the Internationalization of Education (SEPIE).

Keywords:

Education, training, third sector, entrepreneurship.